More Vision for SLAM

SLAM has been identified as a key problem in mobile robotics for over 20 years [4, 46], and has received much attention since, especially these last 10 years. An overview of the problem and the main proposed solutions can be found in [10, 11]. Dozens of robots now use on-board SLAM solutions on an everyday basis in laboratories.

First SLAM solutions concerned robots evolving on a 2D plane, that perceive the environment with a laser range finder. It is only quite recently that solutions to SLAM using vision have been proposed: first using stereovision [16, 41], and then with monocular cameras. A large amount of contributions to the latter problem have rapidly been proposed since the pioneerwork of [7] (see for example [35, 6, 21, 13]), and a commercial software is available since 2005 [28] – though only applicable to robots evolving on a 2D plane.